


Eight-Legged Freaks

by Needle_Bones



Series: Goretober Challenge [2]
Category: Outlast (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, goretober
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-15
Updated: 2015-04-15
Packaged: 2018-03-23 01:58:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3750670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Needle_Bones/pseuds/Needle_Bones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I don’t believe that man’s ever been to medical school…</p>
<p>[Day Two: Extra Limbs/Eyes/Etc]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eight-Legged Freaks

Doctor Richard Trager had made the mistake of allowing himself to be bored.

Being bored tended to lead him to grand-scale projects, most of which he would never finish and would instead allow to (not so) quietly die and rot away in the various rooms he'd commandeered for research and testing.

This was not what happened.

Rather than abandoning his new-found love of sewing, every little success seemed to force it deeper into the muddled and blood-strained fabric that was the man, the myth, the doctor by that point in time.

“All right,” he said, pretending the tape recorder still worked. “So, I hit a little snag the other day. See, I can get patient 24601 to move his own limbs but getting him to move the ones I gave him is like pulling teeth, and I'll tell ya this right now, buddy – there is a reason I did not become a dentist.”

The man he was referring to, a funny little blob of anxiety called Larry, was currently curled in a corner of his cell, the two arms he'd been born with wrapped securely around his head. The remaining two – which had been ripped from a previous patient earlier in the day – remained lying uselessly at his sides.

For the life of him, Trager just couldn't puzzle it out. There had to be something he was missing.

Later that evening, when the mood stuck him again, he pulled the whimpering man out of the darkness and secured him to the operating table. Trager's stitching was improving and he was glad to see that the extra arms remained where he'd put them. On a whim, he dug the scalpel blade into the wasting muscles on the patient's back.

Now, the good doctor had spent some of his time in the asylum reading old medical books he'd managed to sneak by the staff and what he'd come away with was this: if you could connect muscles and nerves to a limb, you could make it move.

As simplistic as that was, Trager figured out that by gagging the hell out of his test subject and going inch-by-inch around the edges of the limb, connecting it under the skin rather than on top of it, It moved much more naturally. A small victory, he assumed.

Ordinarily, that would have been enough to keep him satisfied for a while, until the desire to do something else equally insane got its claws into what was left of his brain. This time though... this time for whatever reason, he kept working, kept tweaking things, kept enough test subjects that he could safely toss the ones who (sadly) didn't make it over the barricade he'd set up to keep Frank from eating his genius. Man was like a damn garbage disposal. Infected or not didn't seem to matter to him. Trager thought he might have almost liked the sting of pus and the tell-tale squish and snap of chunks and scar tissue with the way he devoured whatever he tossed him.

Oh, well. At least he was keeping the place from reeking like a power outage at a morgue in the middle of summer.

It took him weeks to get the technique down. A few stitches out of place and the whole thing would bind up. He knew he had something when the man on the table reached up and tried to strangle him... with an arm that hadn't been his originally.

“I'm glad to report that there has been a breakthrough,” Trager rambled. “Seems Mr. Marcus over here was holdin' out on me, weren't ya, buddy?” There was a scream from elsewhere in the room, staticy on the cracking tape. “Anyway. It looks like I've cracked it. Heh. And it only took twenty tries! That's gotta be a record.”

As he spoke, he watched the man move across the floor, testing what remained of his strength and wincing as the stitches pulled and the sensations felt by his four extra limbs hit his brain like an electrical shock. Eventually, the man figured out that the faster he moved, the less the feeling bothered him. It was much easier to sort of... skitter after that demon doctor who had hatched him from his cell.

Trager, for his part, welcomed his new pet. He made a habit of tossing him scraps and occasionally sicking him (and soon enough, his litter-mates) on those unfortunate enough to cross the doctor's path at the wrong moment. Often they would leap from high places with the aid of their two extra legs. Before long, he'd managed to Frankenstein a small army of mutant variants, some with their stitches still raw, infection still only pacing around the edges of their wounds. In their addled state, Trager was lord and master. At the doctor's command, they would fling themselves down from the vents or up from the cracking tile, biting, clawing, ripping at whomever the man deemed unnecessary or a bother to him. If one fell, their body would be used to feed the survivors.

That was really how it all started. One mutilated doctor, a scalpel, and a dream. Real Hollywood stuff. Before long, Trager's skittery creations had over-run the asylum, nesting in vents and under tables, human spiders weaving sticky webs from their congealing saliva. They flocked to him whenever he needed them but otherwise were allowed to roam. Occasionally, one would catch a bird or a wandering patient.

And soon enough, Doctor Trager and his experiments became the stuff of legends in other sections of the asylum. The devil surgeon and his eight-legged freaks.


End file.
